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Paper short abstract

My ethnography of illicit e-waste shipments between Genoa and Kolkata shows how a “wasting interweaving” across state, crime, and business actors racializes and criminalizes Muslim workers, while obscuring European responsibility for environmental harm.

Paper long abstract

India has increasingly become a destination for Europe’s electronic waste (e-waste), as growing volumes of illicit shipments arrive in Indian ports via cargo from countries such as Italy. Anthropological studies of crime have highlighted the concept of intreccio (interweaving) (Schneider 2018), to grasp the complex relations among actors who inhabit the entangled realms of crime, state, and business. At the same time, the illicit shipping of e-waste materials from the Global North to the Global South is part of “container economies” (Leivestad and Markkula 2021), which are central to transnational capital accumulation and global logistics (Escobar et al. 2023). Yet, the question of who bears the blame and costs of maritime e-waste trafficking is still open and deserves further attention. Without analyzing how the global movement and materiality of e-waste shape fluid encounters across state, crime, and business, we risk overlooking forms of criminalization and inequality that make these entwined constellations possible. I propose the lens of “wasting interweaving” to examine how illicit e-waste trafficking shapes distinctions between victims and perpetrators of environmental harm. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Port of Genoa, Italy, and in the Port of Kolkata, India, I trace relations among Muslim workers in Kolkata who trade and dump e-waste, port brokers and authorities, politicians, and NGOs embedded in this wasting interweaving. Ultimately, I show how these entwined relations sustain the racialization of religion and the criminalization of Muslim e-waste workers.